NOVEMBER 2006 ı goodreading 11 author profile after finishing grammar school he applied to Cambridge to read history. ‘It was much easier in those days, of course, because you got much more money as a student,’ he said. ‘I went up in 1973. So ironically, despite the fact that educational oppor- tunities are supposed to have expanded, in many ways they’ve shrunk. The history degrees at Cambridge are constructed so that it’s very difficult for you to specialise, you’re forced to choose subjects from a wide range of periods. But I tended more towards the Ancient period – I think that was largely because there weren’t so many books written, so I didn’t have to read so much. And also, I suppose, because there was so much that wasn’t known, and that sort of ties in with much of my writing, in the sense that I could speculate more, and I enjoyed thinking of possible explana- tions for unknown episodes in history far more than I did just analysing what was known. Though this didn’t go down ter ribly well with some of my supervisors.’ Oddly, Goddard didn’t pursue an academic career specialising in history but went on to train as a teacher in Devon. But he never taught, discovering that he just didn’t enjoy teaching while doing his teaching practice. So for ten years he worked as a clerk in the edu- cation department of Devon County Council. During those years – which he insists weren’t boring, although he admits that ‘I thought there had to be a better way of earning a crust’ – he thought about writing books. ‘I’d done a lot of complaining to other people about how books should be written and how the books I was reading weren’t as good as I thought they should be.’ But it wasn’t until he got mar ried that he actually put his money where his mouth was. At last, ‘there was somebody there who didn’t let me get away with all the excuses I’d made to myself for not making any effort. In fact a poorly paid and mentally undemanding job is really ideal for becoming a writer because it leaves you a lot of mental energy and it gives you a lot of incentive. Moreover, when the time came to become a writer full-time I wasn’t giving very much up! A lot of people would find it very difficult to become a writer if they were having to give up a highly-paid job. So a decade of nondescript, badly paid employment is highly to be recommended!’ What were these books that so incensed him he felt he could do better? ‘Just novels I was reading,’ he replied diplomatically. ‘I found that they just didn’t pay sufficient attention to what I thought were important things about plot and structure.There was a lot of sloppiness, really. Quite good writing sometimes, and other virtues, but often let down by not seeming to know that storytelling involves quite a bit of craft as well as art. I think that’s still the case with quite a lot of novels.’ Goddard stands out as being a very plot- and nar rative-driven writer. He plans and checks things very carefully – he has to now, or people will pick him up. ‘Sometimes I read in other books people who move across distances and I think, they must have flown! Not everybody’s bothered by stuff like that, but I read quite well-respected novels making mistakes in which the character’s age changes halfway through the story, then switches back, or some memory they have is inconsistent with the age they’ve been given – usually, if you check, you’ll find it’s consistent with the age of the author! I’ve discussed this with other people but they’ve not noticed it. It’s only me, and one or two other people, the sort of people who write to authors.You always make mistakes.You think you know something and therefore you don’t bother to check it, but in fact what you know is not quite accurate. And there’s always someone obliging out there who will point it out! They’re quite useful, actually; there’s a coinage expert who wrote to me about some coin I’d used in a book that wasn’t quite right, so now, anything set in the past involving coins, it’s useful to know that this chap can help.’ And set in the past – albeit the recent past – or connected to the past, is something that unifies Goddard’s many books. At one point in Into the Blue, a character says to Harry: ‘Your grasp of history impresses me, Mr Barnett. Perhaps you understand – as many do not – that the past is not only always with us, but is us, the cause and context of our every action. What we do is prompted by what we believed a minute or a year or a century ago.’ Is that what Goddard believes? ‘Yes,’ he replied firmly. ‘I certainly believe that our obsession with modernity and the contemporary and the future is excessive, and I asked him about the complex nature of his books. ‘I have a convoluted imagination,’ he responded with a grin. ‘I can’t really do simple plots. I like to take one story and put it together with another story and possibly a third story. But partly I think that’s because that’s what life is like — it’s not a simple plot.’